Clicks in south-western Bantu languages: contact-induced vs. language-internal lexical change

This paper aims at acquiring a better understanding of how click phonemes diffused through the lexicon of four south western Bantu (SWB) languages: Fwe (K402), Mbukushu (K333), Manyo (K332) and Kwangali (K33). A fifth click Bantu language from the same region, i.e. Yeyi (R41), will be referred to as a comparative touchstone, but the origin of its clicks will not be considered in any detail. Since click phonemes cannot be reconstructed to Proto Bantu, it is generally agreed upon that their acquisition in these and other Bantu languages results from contact induced change, namely through interference with southern African non Bantu click languages, better known as ‘Khoisan’ languages. In this paper, we do not contest that the integration of click phonemes in these Bantu languages was indeed set off through contact with non Bantu click languages. We do argue, however, that the occurrence of these foreign phonemes is not restricted to words of non Bantu origin. They also spread to native vocabulary through language-internal change. This is a relatively new insight. The presence of click phonemes in proper Bantu vocabulary is widely believed to be a phenomenon only found in certain south eastern Bantu click languages. In this paper, we will mainly focus on the linguistic evidence for the lexical diffusion of click phonemes in the SWB languages, reserving the social and demographic conditions underlying this phenomenon for future research